is the AI push at work upskilling, or just train-your-replacement? “ i will not promote”
Posted by socialmichu@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 18 comments
Every company on earth is suddenly real concerned about “AI fluency.”
My company’s AI rollout isn’t pushy. No mandatory trainings, no “show us your workflow” demos. Instead it’s just… aggressively helpful.
An internal AI evangelist who’s overly eager to assist. A dedicated #ai-help channel. Basically unlimited tokens. Constant encouragement to share prompts and build workflows. Zero pressure, just vibes and positivity.
And I can’t tell if I’m being paranoid or if this is exactly what a smart company would do if they wanted employees to voluntarily document their expertise into a system that replaces them later.
management is burning tokens like crazy, vibe-coding stuff nobody uses, posting screenshots.
The team quietly cleans up the mess later. Nobody says anything because they’re “innovating.”
Is your company being genuinely supportive? Or is the new playbook to make AI adoption so easy and so encouraged that people happily upload their expertise into the tool that deprecates them by next year?
The niceness feels sus as fuck and I can’t tell if it’s a trap or if I’ve just been online too long.
TheRealJesus2@reddit
How does this differ from any other form of help and knowledge sharing at your company for other tools, techniques and processes?
Is that different from a writing help channel that has templates for different purposes and free company access to word processors? Are the eager writers helping give recommendations training their replacement? I’d argue no
Meta’s latest announcement with the key loggers is a totally different beast Than what you describe here. They train models. Highly doubtful your company will train an ai or even codify this into bespoke tooling of any sort.
Learn. Be curious. Teach others, too.
Expert-Reaction-7472@reddit
mods need to do something about this shit
socialmichu@reddit (OP)
About what?
Expert-Reaction-7472@reddit
all i see is AI written posts about AI
socialmichu@reddit (OP)
Why do you assume it was wrote by ai? English is not my first language so I use ai as a spelling corrector on crack, meaning it also fixes grammar and organize my ideas coherently. Don’t be too fast assuming everything is ai bud…
Expert-Reaction-7472@reddit
it's the patterns Lists, numbers. Hyperbolic, exaggerated, words like (basically, constant, just, quietly, nobody)
people dont write like that. Maybe one thing but when you get every other sentence it's just obvious and it's tiring and reads like a brochure.
Seen that excuse about the spell corrector on crack before - fair enough, just dont expect engagement when it's not your own words anymore.
Plastic_Monitor_5786@reddit
Just write in your own words. You and your readers will be better off for it. The default LLM tone is very off-putting to most of us because Reddit is so overrun by bot outputs using that same style at this point.
socialmichu@reddit (OP)
I like good grammar. I see it as a sign of respect to the language I’m trying to communicate in, even if it’s my 4th language. That’s why I use ai, it does not do the thinking for me. I have 5 languages constantly battling in my head at all times.
shigdebig@reddit
Yes you should be worried. Your personal development is less important to your boss that your productivity. You are off not using AI and focusing on improving your personal skills. And yes am I talking about communication skills and writing in English?
tndrthrowy@reddit
I am nice last sentence?
mpanase@reddit
Same here, except we get a manager (CTO or PM, usually) do a mandatory show&tell with yet another shit app they built from the ground up.
They make sure to always mention "without having a clu eof what I'm doing", "10x or 5x faster than it took to build a couple screens for our production app".
They had an engineer work 2 weeks to improve a backup system so we save $1000/month. They spend a ,ultiple of that in tokens.
It didn't occur to them that engineers would figure out how to use the tool way better than them.
Today I had a strategic meeting with the head of product and the cto. None of them had thought about whether we need to focus on growth, on reliability, on cost optimization, on upselling existing customers, ... zero, nada, zilch.
MoreRespectForQA@reddit
It's neither. It's a collective hallucination of productivity improvements.
dbxp@reddit
Few companies are developing their own AI engines so you're not training your replacement. Companies would love to be able to replace employees but they don't want to replace themselves with a competitor which is what will happen if that training data goes to a supplier.
socialmichu@reddit (OP)
Fair point, but the replacement doesn’t come from training the foundation model. It comes from the projects, prompt libraries, and internal workflows your team builds on top of it.
vansterdam_city@reddit
Your description sounds a lot like my company. I don't think we arrived here through some intentional plan.
The issue is that nobody truly understands what these tools mean in the long term for our space. This sounds like a company letting their employees explore in a grassroots way, including management. They were once coders too, and probably having fun with it again.
Now, it's not all sunshine and roses. Whether your management realizes it or not, our field has been structurally impacted. The shape of our work is changing and in 2 years I don't expect everyone to make it along for the ride. We cannot bury our head in the sand and expect things to go on as they have been.
But it isn't management's fault - the world around us has changed.
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
deskilling has been the nature of the industrial revolution since the beginning, and it has been active in software development for decades, things are accellarating
cbusmatty@reddit
Like any transformational effort, you can be on the front end of it, leading or you can be on the he backend of it, being dictated to and replaceable
socialmichu@reddit (OP)
Agree… 100%